This morning, I learned you can put too much kale in a smoothie.

It was that sturdy dinosaur kale too (Lacinato, an Italian variety), with its pebbly dark green leaves, that, in a salad, chew up rich and fibrous and make you feel all healthy as you’re swallowing it down alongside the carrot shreds, tricolor quinoa, market-bought pea shoots and toasted organic sliced almonds for crunch.

But in a smoothie, with only half a frozen banana, a handful of wild blueberries and some past-expiration date pomegranate kefir, the kale will dominate, and I’m just not feeling it this morning, to reassemble the Nutri-bullet, pour the now blue-green frozen sludge back into the blender cup, and add a tablespoon of maple syrup to take the edge off. I’ll muscle through the intensely grassy, grazing-the-back-forty flavor and get on with the rest of my morning. Tomorrow’s smoothie will be differently ambitious, and a smidge less virtuous.

Food and I have a complicated relationship, and I’m certain that it’s my fault.

I’d say overall I eat well, following some generally accepted guidelines that vegetables should take up most of my plate, and there should be some protein in sight. I live happily without soda, hamburgers and steaks and veal, have a soft spot for scallops and red shrimp in my stir fry, and keep raw almonds in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk at work next to the 70% dark chocolate (fair trade). I love apples (see “Edible Jewels of Autumn”, November 10, 2019), cucumbers and hummus, and eat peanut butter right from the jar, but not more than a tablespoon at a time. At each meal, there’s a healthy fistful of vitamins and other supplements that I swear by (turmeric with black pepper, psyllium husk capsules, Maitake mushroom, milk thistle, B-complex with C, garlic pearls, red yeast rice and Vitamin D), and I’m pretty darn hydrated with water and green tea throughout the day. I try, really hard, to stay on track with all this.

But a 12-hour workday that has me driving across three counties at night to get home before ten o’clock will be interrupted by a quick stop at Taco Bell’s drive-thru and I wake up regretting the side order of nachos I added to my bean burrito (I know there’s lard in the tortillas, and don’t want to know what’s in the cheese sauce). I hastily pack a salad for lunch, add a can of tuna and an apple, and forgive myself. I want so much to purge the pantry of anything processed and in a box, grow and dry my own beans and roll my own oats, but haven’t made it there yet. White cheddar popcorn and Veggie Straws make my greens and tuna lunch taste better somehow, and our friend Jen makes the best brownie drop cookies after we’ve stuffed ourselves with her homemade pizza. Today’s over-kaled smoothie was supposed to balance all that out, but I think I may have gone too far.

There are several folks in our circle whose eating lifestyles go the route of low-carb, Mediterranean, vegetarian and vegan, and it’s pleasure to eat what they make for us. We arrive early enough to help put our meal together, never leave hungry, and incorporate some of their creative inspirations into our own cooking for days after our gatherings. Our friend Nina makes the best red lentil, onion, and coconut milk soup, so now we have all those ingredients on hand should such a soup emergency arise. We’ve added low-carb wraps to our bread box and embraced meatless bowl food dinners. Even with these focused food frameworks, though, I think we all fall off our respective dietary commitment wagons now and then. When we spy a confection from the local patisserie on someone’s counter, we do not judge. We savor each bite of tiramisu on our plates, grateful that they remembered how much we love the mingling of marsala-soaked lady fingers and cocoa on our tongues. You know how I like to employ magical thinking at times—food shared with friends and cherished family members can’t hurt us. Love wipes out a multitude of dietary transgressions.

When I’ve wiped my mouth with one of our faded cloth napkins and washed the last dish, what it really comes down to is keeping food right-sized in our minds. That whole “live to eat, or eat to live?” is the question thrumming in our conscience, and what we allow ourselves to swallow is simply the period on the end of a long sentence that articulates how we feel about food. For about nine or so years, before I met Patrick, I was a dedicated and annoyingly zealous vegetarian. If you dined with me, you’d also get a whopping and detailed side of what that burger was going to do to your colon (I said “detailed”, and meant it), and how much of the earth’s water was sacrificed in order to bring that portion of a dead cow to your plate. It all may have been true, but I missed the point. A friend just wanted to share a meal, not be lectured and bullied into why my spinach and whole grain pasta was the more noble food choice. I’d forgotten that food was forever enmeshed with culture and history and relationships, and that the main dish wasn’t necessarily the main reason for getting together in the first place. Thanks to a couple of brave friends who weren’t put off by confrontations, I learned to tone down my fervor and remember that sharing food was, most times, a sacred encounter of souls, not the debate stage during an election year.

I’m not a vegetarian now, but come to the food on my plate with a more informed and respectful approach to its origins, the many, many hands that have touched it on its journey to our kitchen, and the way it will nurture me at a cellular level. That takes some considerable slowing down and suspending of judgment, and gallons of humility. I am lucky to not live in a food desert, to have a place to grow and harvest my salads, and to educate myself about the organizations that bring farmers’ markets to the city where older adults with vouchers can take home a tomato in season and shake hands with the woman who plucked it from the vine that morning. I realize not everyone has what I have. What I do with that awareness will continue to shape what goes in the skillet and down the gullet.

The lesson for today was a simple one focused on quantity in relation to other ingredients and desired outcome. Like any good recipe, there will be variations.

A little kale goes a long way.